Aus der Kurve

Documentary film.

Kolyma is a long highway that stretches through the deepest Russian North-east. It was the epicentre of the Soviet prison camp system. Millions of people built them and lived there under the most dreadful conditions. And now the time is running short for survivors or their direct descendants to tell their story firsthand.

"Where is the geographical center of Europe? No less than a dozen towns within a radius of two-thousand kilometers claim the distinction of being the "center." So, the Polish film director Stanislaw Mucha and his film team take off on an entertaining odyssey – sometimes burlesque, sometimes tragicomic – across Central Europe in search of the one-and-only, the "true center"of a continent covered with centers…

A film about Andy Warhol's extended family, whom he never met, from rural Slovakia. The film follows the filmmakers as they travel through eastern Slovakia to interview Warhol's surviving relatives, ethnic-Ruthenians living near the Polish border in Miková, and to visit the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce. The museum is shown to be in a poor state, with the museum director and staff openly soliciting donations from the viewer and giving out the museum's bank account details.

Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD in Germany, ORF in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland.

Francis Ratay witnesses the theft of church painting "Angel with violin". The entire incident recorded by an amateur camera. The thief turns out to Benedict Weber, gallery owner and art connoisseur. Francis comes to his gallery. Blackmails him, that will provide police record, unless the image in three days back in place.

The weather station on the Khodovarikha peninsula on the edge of the Russian Arctic Ocean in the Nenets Autonomous District is probably one of the loneliest workplaces in the world. Unimaginably the weather for our weather forecasts is measured there using the simplest of tools without any electronics. The residents are a professional soldier who has been retrained as a meteorologist and was traumatized in the Chechen war, his young wife, whose previous life in the world of cities and money was a brutal failure, a cancer-stricken pensioner who has returned to his birthplace, the aggressive, boozy head of the station with a dubious, possibly criminal past, and Jack, the dog. Five traumatized souls removed from society, who, in the solitude of the seemingly paradisiacal, hostile nature of the Arctic, try to deal with themselves, the absence of civilization, their human needs and shortcomings, and to master their lives.

Is it possible to film miracles? The camera shows pilgrims, who watch a window of a school in a small town in the East of Poland, where several people already believed to have seen the Virgin Mary.

There are already more Gypsies in Europe than Danes, for example. Estimates range from 6-11 million. They live everywhere, but especially in the east, and although they live everywhere, you can't see them anywhere. The average European hardly knows anything about them. Mucha's documentary tries to change this circumstance and sensitively throw prejudices overboard. With U5 Filmproduktion, Stanislaw Mucha has brought an old-established Frankfurt production company on board, and continues his habit of working with a local company. - @LFFI

On his documentary journey along the Black Sea coast, documentary filmmaker Stanislaw Mucha paints an idiosyncratic picture of the interface between Europe and Asia.

In the Chinese village of Dafen, you can find anything and everything: a Gerhard Richter starts at 30 euros, a small Van Gogh costs 45 euros, his Sunflowers in medium size goes for 100. Monet’s Water Lilies is 120, Rembrandt’s self-portraits are 150, and for the smile of the Mona Lisa, you have to shell out around 200 because it’s supposedly not so easy for Chinese painters to copy. The output of this forgery is gigantic: over 10 million paintings are produced here each year. Thousands of painters work day and night in cramped spaces, painting the works of the great masters, which are primarily sold in bulk orders to Europe and America. Dafen’s industrious residents live from, with, and despite the great art—children grow up between Klimt’s The Kiss and Munch’s The Scream, families sleep under Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, watched over by Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.